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Size matters

Extremely small. As in one-ten-thousandth-the-width-of-a-human-hair kind of small.

Keith Thomas, president of a Northern Nanotechnologies Inc., at the company’s Bay St. lab in downtown Toronto. (MICHAEL STUPARYK / TORONTO STAR)

Thomas is the president of Northern Nanotechnologies Inc., a small startup firm based in Toronto that is involved in the burgeoning new nano materials market, which is forecast to be a trillion dollar industry in the next decade.

Nanotechnology is the development of extremely small particles of matter that can only be measured using a nanometre scale. One nanometre is one-billionth of a metre. Put another way, it's the amount a man's beard would grow in the time it takes to raise the shaver to his face.

Consumers are already inundated with nanotechnology branding, since the materials are used in everything from sunscreen to stain resistant khakis and semiconductors.

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Kids are familiar with nanotechnology from Star Trek, where the Borg, an evil alien race, transforms humans into cyborgs using a nanoprobe injection.

Nanotechnology doesn't promise to turn humanity into evil drones, but it does have medical applications such as drugs that seek to destroy cancer cells and contact lenses that let you check blood sugar by looking in the mirror.

"We think this is the next big thing in the 21st century. It will change the way everything works," says Thomas at his Bay Street office. "From the stone age, to iron, to steel, to plastics, this is the next quantum shift."

Consumer Reports magazine says nanotechnology "promises to change our world as profoundly as electricity and the internal combustion engine."

Not surprisingly, there has been a gold rush of technology firms worldwide trying to be the first to develop patents that will capitalize on the new science. In 2005, $30 billion (U.S.) worth of manufactured goods used some form of nanotechnology, double the amount of the year before.

Thomas is just one of those firms, but it has a pedigree that places it above much of the crowd. It is also illustrative of Canada's sometimes underrated potential to create technology industries from the halls of academia.

Just over a year old, the company was created using patented technology developed by University of Toronto chemistry professor Cynthia Goh. Producing tiny nano materials can be expensive. But Goh, the company's chief scientific officer, believes her company has discovered a way to create large commercial quantities of nanoparticles in a more cost-efficient way.

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Northern hopes that, despite some sizable competition out there, its technology will be customizable and easier to integrate into commonly used production processes, giving it a competitive advantage.

Northern is currently focusing on simple applications for customers, targeting industries that deal in glass, coatings, paints and chemical manufacturing.

"We want to walk before we run. We're not changing the product much, but if you develop say a coating on a window that is heat reflective, you may be able to sell that window for 10 times what you would normally if it didn't have nanotechnology," says Thomas.

In the short term, the company is developing custom projects for clients including coatings for glass and steel with superior performance characteristics such as more strength and durability.

They are able to do this because once materials are reduced to a nanoscale, they begin to exhibit very different properties.

Holding a coffee cup and some empty creamers on his boardroom table, Thomas demonstrates: "When you reduce the coffee cup to the size of these creamers it can hold just as much but it takes up less space and has more surface area, becoming far more efficient. This ability to change every other property is what is so exciting."

Despite the hype around nanotechnology, applications have mostly been limited to first generation consumer goods such as titanium dioxide particles in sunscreens and zinc oxide in cosmetics and paints, which allow smoother and more dense application.

Thomas is former CEO of Vector Innovations, which was sold last year to an American company. Searching for a new company to invest in, Thomas, who has an engineering degree from the University of Toronto and an MBA from Columbia University in New York, decided to place his bets on Northern after looking at some 40 different proposals.

"They had come up with a process but they couldn't figure out what to do with it," said Thomas, who is the husband of popular CFTO anchor Pauline Chan. "This field is so new, so broad that it really hit me that this was the future."

Universities are incubators for many new technologies, but one typical problem is in getting those ideas to market. "In general, universities have a hard time taking the idea from the professor's mind and commercializing it, but that's where some of the best inventions come from," said Thomas.

One issue with nanotechnology is that it is so new there are concerns over whether it can be dangerous to human health – such as entering the bloodstream in unpredictable ways.

"Before these products show up en masse in stores and doctors' offices, a worldwide effort is needed to understand what nanoparticles can do to our health and the environment," said Consumers Union president Jim Guest in a recent issue of Consumers Reports.

"There are lots of things we don't know and there is a need for a strong review," agrees Thomas.

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